Since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan a variety of organizations have pooped up to support the troops who have volunteered their service to this country. One of the reason I write this blog is because of my involvement with the Veteran Issues Support Initiative and Outreach Program (VISION). VISION was started by a couple of students at the Syracuse College of Law a couple years ago and has evolved into a viable program that provides some great benefits to the veterans of Upstate New York. One of the main events the VISION holds is Valor Day. Valor Day is coming up this semester on April 5th so I thought I would take the opportunity to plug the program and talk a little bit about it.
Valor Day is an event held at the law school designed to provide veterans with some legal services that they might not be able to get in many other places. Many lawyers from the area come to the law school to provide guidance on legal issues ranging from divorce, VA claims, and discharge upgrades just to name a few. How the program works is a veteran will meet with a lawyer and discuss their issue(s), then the lawyer will advise the client on what the next steps should be by providing information who to contact and hopefully resolve the issue. The importance of this service stems from the fact that many of our nations veterans, particularly the older ones and those without significant funds simply do not have access to legal services. The VA does provide some free legal services but, much like many of the other services provided by the VA, it’s slow and not always effective. Valor Day provides a streamlined process for those in need to first understand the nature of their legal issue, and hopefully provide an avenue for resolution. As a side benefit the law students who volunteer their time get to spend time with lawyers and clients learning how to interview and deal with real world problems.
Valor Day is also so much more than just legal services. Along with the lawyers we also host an information fair where local veterans organizations such as the VFW, Wounded Warriors, and many others provide information about how they can help the veteran community. This provides a nice venue complete with free food and drinks for local veterans to socialize not only with each other but with the student volunteers as well. I have been proud to be a part of this group that has helped a large number of veterans in need. The program continues to grow with the idea that there will be a full time clinic at the law school to provide services year round. As the event draws near and concludes I will provide a break down of how it went with some data on how many veterans we are truly helping.
Veterans Issues
To Be or Not to Be Disabled
Today’s post will be short and sweet and involves something that came to my attention as I was filling out a job application. One of the many benefits veterans receive is preference eligibility for job consideration, especially when applying to federal jobs. How it works is you can either be 5 point eligible, meaning that you served a minimum of 3 years and received an honorable discharge or you are a 10-point eligible, meaning that you have a certain level of service-connected disability. The main issue with this is not everyone that claims a 10-point preference based on disability is actually disabled. When a military member is on their way out of the service a great deal of attention is focused on learning how to deal with the VA for disability claims. Veteran’s claims range in terms of the percentage in which you are disabled. For example, someone that had surgery but recovered fully but still experiences pain might be 20 percent service-connected disabled, while someone who is an amputee or suffers from severe PTSD might be 75 too 100 percent disabled. Take a look at the VA website to get a more detailed look at how it breaks down, although I promise you still will not understand how it works.
Many times vets will claim just about anything they can to get some level of disability and I believe this is at the encouragement of VA officials. I haven’t been able to pin down a reason except for the “if you don’t use it you loose it” philosophy of funding. It makes sense for the VA to want to generate clients in order to gain additional funding and programs from the government. The main issue concerning this becomes when completely able people are claiming a level of disability and taking advantage of programs and money they do not really need. Some vets will claim that a minor loss in hearing makes them eligible for 20 percent disability and somewhere around 200 dollars a month for a majority of their life. On a personal note I claim no disability, and had metal plates put in my arm while I was in service. Many of my friends tell me that I was stupid for not claiming it, but my injury was my fault, and if I take the money it might mean someone with a real problem may have to wait longer to get their much needed support from the VA.
Additionally, a limited number of benefits like the job preference system becomes something that people who don’t really deserve the advantage now have an edge in gaining employment. All this is not to say that there are not millions of veterans who deserve every penny they get from the government, but it does leave some questions. Should the VA have such a policy as to allow any change in your body to be considered a service-connected disability? Is there a way to change the system? I do not see a way how there is, without potential hurting those in need of disability services. In a time where the government is claiming to be cash poor, and jobs are hard enough to find it strikes me as poor taste to take advantage of the flawed system. For my money, I just didn’t want to say on every job I applied for that I was disabled regardless of how small, but I could use a few hundred extra dollars a month.
Stolen Valor
While I am currently working on a deeper issue concerning veterans issues I thought today I would cover a lighter yet still important topic: Stolen Valor. Pretending to be in the military or the police is not necessarily a new phenomenon but with the sweeping speed in which news travels the world these days “fakers” have become a prominent fixture in the military veteran community. Not a day goes by where I don’t see a picture of someone dressed up in full military uniform proudly displaying a vast array of awards and ribbons; The problem with these photos is often the awards being displayed would have been impossible to earn. The typical case involves a person claiming to have been a Navy Seal with five combat tours, earning several combat awards for bravery, while only serving for 4 years or so. The problem there is it takes years just to become a Seal and combat tours can be long. Generally these people have just enough knowledge about the training or deployment cycles to demonstrate just enough facts where someone who didn’t know any better could be fooled. I actually ran into somebody while in DC who claimed to be a part of the Bin Laden raid and to be perfectly honest almost had me fooled. Real professionals (particularly those with combat experience) don’t see themselves as heroes and often keep quite about the things they have done or the awards they have earned unless asked about them. That is not to say occasionally a veteran might be boastful and entertain the local bar with stories about their service (I have been guilty of this myself a few times) but generally we like to be considered the quiet professionals who do the job because we were told to.
Stolen valor has become so rampant that a law has been passed making it a crime. The Stolen Valor Act of 2013 makes it a crime to fraudulent claim certain things about military service. The Act primarily focuses on fraudulent claims of having earned awards for bravery and combat service such as the Medal of Honor or a Combat Action Ribbon. What the law does not do is make it a crime to lie about serving at all (which it should), but obviously the enforcement mechanism for that would be difficult. The full text of the Act is available here. Moreover, as the law stands it is only a crime when the fraud is done for monetary gain. This is in part because of the Supreme Court case in US v. Alvarez 132 S. Ct. 1421 which declared a prior version of this law unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment. An additional limitation with the Act is its penalties are generally just civil or criminal fines. If it were up to me it would be life in a super-max prison, but obviously that doesn’t make practical sense.
The weaknesses in the law have sprouted numerous veteran groups to establish ways to seek someone’s record for themselves. One fairly popular site, StolenValor.com, has a wealth of information about the subject. There you will find numerous cases where false claims were made and the claimants were busted. My personal favorite way to fight this issue is with the “make him/her famous campaign.” This is a social media strategy where certain groups (that I won’t name here) post pictures and information about those claiming to be things in which they are not. Eventually what happens is their personal accounts get slammed with comments and some even get shut down. While the Stolen valor Act is a good start to solving this type of problem, the veteran community will probably continue to police itself and bring down those who would seek to dishonor our service.
Mission Accomplished ? The Fall of Fallujah
For the last 12 years America’s military had been fighting terrorism and other forces around the globe, namely in Iraq and Afghanistan. I write today to discuss the recent events where Al-Qaeda has taken control of the city of Fallujah. Now, any readers may wonder why I bring this up in a policy blog regarding veterans issue. Well, the reason is that many veterans fought hard and bravely to take that city from the grasp of the enemy. The reaction in the veteran community that the city has been lost is devastating to some. (See link here.) I personally know several people who fought there, house-to-house, street-to-street with many loosing their lives.
What makes this important is the decisions that are made both on and off the battlefield affect the lives of veterans long after they have finished serving. From a policy standpoint we can argue all day about what the US should and should not be doing. However, from a military standpoint you don’t pack your bags until the job is done and I can assure it wasn’t. I was there; I have worked fairly closely with the Iraqi Army and Security Forces and it did not appear to me they were ready to take over without our help. As I write this I would be willing to bet there is a Marine somewhere in a bar telling his friends that if he could he would sign up and take the city back. These feelings stemmed from the notion that veterans do not want to feel as if their sacrifices were made in vain. Many combat veterans already suffer with problems assessing there worth and their value to society, which is a factor in PTSD. However, for many the ability to hang your hat on the battles you won in combat is something, at least for me, is always a point of pride.
It would be foolish for me to sit here and say I think we should go back, or that we should have stayed there forever. The truth of the matter is I am not really sure what the answer is or why certain decisions are made. What I will say is that policy decisions, especially those that concern combat operations should not be made for internal political reasons. It can affect the whole purpose of fighting in the first place (whatever the reason may be). As I write this Charles Krauthammer is being interviewed on the O’rielly Factor on Fox News. (Generally, interviews are available the day after they air on foxnews.com) Personal feelings people have about Fox News aside the interview was pretty good and suggest the removal of troops from Iraq was entirely motivated by politics, regardless of the consequences. This topic is worth giving some thought, considering what is going on over there today.
The longer I write about this the harder it becomes to keep my personal feelings out of it, so I will attempt to leave you with a few thoughts. The first is that regardless of how one might feel about the various wars being fought or the troops, it is important to realize that veterans had a job to do and they did it; this should not be considered senseless or without merit. Second, is it right for military leaders or those in charge of our armed forces to make decisions based on their political beliefs or ideals? It sounds foolish to think that decisions could be made in another way other than political, but sometimes it just might be necessary. Finally, maybe all the media and anger from the veteran community about the loss of Fallujah to terrorist is pointless. That is to say, maybe the Iraqi’s will step up to the plate and show the world that they are in fact ready to deal with these issues without the help of the Americans.
PTSD: The Scars of Combat
In 2007, I came home from Iraq just before Thanksgiving, it is often something I don’t really think about until my Mom reminds me. That Thanksgiving my family and a friend of mine from the Marines ate our meal at a hotel buffet in California, the food was great and it was great being around my family again. I was a little older than most guys in the Marines and had been away from my family before for long periods of time, but this of course was a little different. This time I had been in combat and no matter how much you think you’re the same, there is something about it that changes you, if only just a little. I thought this week I would talk about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I have mentioned it in passing in my posts about suicide and other issues but haven’t really discussed it detail.
On a personal note, I do not believe that I suffer from PTSD, and 90 percent of the time I consider myself a normal person who happens to have had a few unique and harrowing experiences. By most accounts my time in Iraq was not filled with gunfire and waves of enemies coming after us as you would see in a movie about Vietnam. Our unit was shot at, and we encountered IED’s and other problems, but others among the ranks have had far more violent experiences and carry the scars of combat wherever they go. What I can say is that I probably don’t sleep as well as I used to, and for a while I hated fireworks, but not to the point that I did not go see them every 4th of July. Most infantry guys become more aggressive and emotional, and those feelings come and go. For others, it is constant.
The National Institute of Mental Health has a great outline (found here) about the issue surrounding PTSD and the steps that are being taken to conduct further research to help those whose lives will never be the same. PTSD is characterized as a change in the body’s fight or flight response, the reaction that helps us survive when we believe we are in danger. PTSD changes this response to believe you are in fear even though the danger is gone. Not just infantrymen who have been in combat suffer from this affliction; rape victims, those who witness something violent like a train wreck, and other people who have suffered from abuse can also encounter problems with PTSD.
Additionally, not everyone who experiences a trauma has PTSD. As far as veterans are concerned there are many services available to work through some of the problems associated with PTSD. When units return from a combat zone, we have to undergo classes that discuss whether or not the trashcan will explode on the street corner in our home city and that not everyone who is middle eastern is trying to kill us. These statements seem silly to some and often when I tell people about theses classes it get a laugh; and quite frankly, while I was sitting in one of them, I also thought it was funny. But the reality is I have seen tough, strong Marines take cover when a car backfires or when fireworks go off, a reaction most normal people probably wouldn’t have. A guy I served with goes to the VA hospital once a week to talk to a shrink about his experiences. I am not sure if it helps him or not, but my guess is it is better than not talking about it. For the purpose of this post, I thought I would just get out some of the basics and my thoughts about PTSD and will do a follow up with a bit more detail in a future post.
For now, as Thanksgiving approaches, I find myself thankful that if I did feel as though I had problems I have a support element to talk about it. However, not every veteran has that going for him or her. Also, this Thanksgiving, remember there will be a future veteran somewhere in the world sleeping on the ground or not sleeping at all as bullets and explosions fill the air while we eat Turkey with our families.